Politics in Alaska are different.
On Mary Peltola’s Senate campaign website is a low-res video game called “Salmon Run,” in which you can play the part of a fish trying to avoid being caught by commercial trawlers. As you navigate around nets and menacing ocean predators, messages pop up about Dan Sullivan, the state’s Republican senator seeking re-election. “Dan Sullivan took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the trawling lobby,” one reads. If you clear the run without being caught, you are congratulated for avoiding Mr. Sullivan’s nets.
Ms. Peltola’s kelp-roots campaign, in which trawlers are a big issue, is taglined “fish, family and freedom.” Her pitch can seem parochial, even incomprehensible beyond Alaska’s frigid waters.
Yet it is a blaring statement to the activists trying to reshape her party: In today’s hyper-online, partisan, siloed politics, the real outsider Democratic candidate isn’t the leftmost one. It’s the one who has actually spent time, well, outside.
Alaska is, if not ruby-red, at least salmon pink. In her effort to beat the political odds, Ms. Peltola, 53, offers a contrast, in age, demeanor and substance, to Washington’s aging Democratic establishment and to the faction trying to replace it — an ascendant, increasingly organized and aggressive left wing.
“We really do need people in these positions who are normal people,” Ms. Peltola told me. There aren’t many of those left in Congress, from which the constant need to raise campaign money and navigate impossible factional purity tests repels all but the most committed powerseekers.
Ms. Peltola differentiates herself from a noxious Democratic brand by building a practical personal one rather than adopting a trendy ideological one. The logic of her approach: In the tough races that make or break Democratic majorities, сandidates who read off the progressive left’s script will underperform.
Sure, even with her own lines, she might lose. Her lack of polish is one potential problem.
Voters often fall for politicians who act authentic — think Bill Clinton and his studied sentimentality or George W. Bush and his cowboy cosplay. Ms. Peltola is authentic. Hers is not a calculated, polished, flannel-shirt-sleeves-rolled-up-to-just-the-right-length sort of authenticity. Ms. Peltola’s is rawer.
Listening to her, one must regularly confront a question: Was it a gaffe?
“When I served in the 117th and 118th Congresses, there were six senators in the middle, out of a hundred,” she said in September to a small crowd in Valdez, a town of 4,000 on Prince William Sound. “Now there are three senators in the middle, out of a hundred. I would like to be the fourth.”
Who are the three Senate pragmatists, I asked her after the event? “Lisa Murkowski,” she said immediately. “Angus King,” she offered with less self-assurance, her intonation rising as if she were asking a question. Then a pause. “Who’s the other one?” she said. Eventually, a campaign aide mentioned Susan Collins. “Yea, Susan Collins,” Ms. Peltola said.
National Democrats might wish that she had just moved on. Ms. Peltola made common cause with their top target, Ms. Collins, Maine’s sitting Republican senator, and undercut Troy Jackson, the Democrat running to unseat her.
In both campaign events I attended, Ms. Peltola paused awkwardly as she tried to remember what she wanted to say to her audience. The Times also reported last month that her temperament — including the purported use of slurs with staff members — made her congressional office chaotic and her campaign a mess.
Still, observers in Anchorage doubt that these reports or her plain manner will matter much — they might even help her with Alaska’s many hardscrabble independents. Having to stop for a bit to remember what to say? Forgetting senators? Not exactly senatorial. But definitely relatable.
The truth is that Ms. Peltola, in her unprepossessing way, would probably work more comfortably with Susan Collins than with Elizabeth Warren.
“I don’t have anything in common with any other candidate,” she said when I asked her about what she and Democrats in other midterm races share. This seems unlikely. But purposefully or not, the statement bolstered the claim, per one of her campaign spokesmen, that she has been one of the “least loyal Democrats.”
Her call for pragmatism is an agenda in itself, reflecting a theory of politics that getting things done by building weird, sometimes uncomfortable political coalitions is better than ideological purity. Her message is for oil-industry workers and small-time fishermen, suburbanites around Anchorage and off-the-grid libertarians, Native and non-Native Alaskans. Her career has been a test case in the proposition that practicality is a common denominator that makes her approachable.
Alaskans “build coalitions based on people who are easy to work with,” she said. They must in their rugged, remote, sparsely inhabited state — population just shy of 750,000.
Ms. Peltola is a lifelong subsistence fisherman from Bethel, an outpost in far west Alaska that is accessible only by plane or boat. An Alaska Native of the Yup’ik people, she captained her own fishing boat at age 14.
Her parents worked on the first congressional campaign of Don Young, a Republican who went on to represent Alaska in the House for decades. Ms. Peltola boasts that, in Alaska’s statehouse, she worked with Ms. Murkowski, a Republican, before Ms. Murkowski rose to the U.S. Senate in 2002. Though a Democrat, Ms. Peltola in 2010 helped Ms. Murkowski’s improbable and successful write-in re-election campaign after Ms. Murkowski lost her party’s primary. Ms. Murkowski returned the favor by endorsing Ms. Peltola when she ran for Congress in 2022. (Ms. Murkowski gave Mr. Sullivan, her follow Republican, a lukewarm endorsement this year but has also defended Ms. Peltola.)
Ms. Peltola won her 2022 race, a special election to replace Mr. Young, who died in office that year. She hired Mr. Young’s chief of staff to run her own office and, by her telling, went “toe-to-toe with the Biden administration.” She pushed President Joe Biden to approve ConocoPhillips’s Willow project, an oil drilling venture in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. She also favors oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, though her pro-oil position isn’t unqualified: She declined to support a bill that would have threatened nearby fisheries.
In her Senate campaign, she typically doesn’t attack “Republican” but rather “D.C.” policies from the past two years in which the G.O.P. has controlled Washington. Ms. Peltola often mentions broadly unpopular Medicaid cuts. The Department of Government Efficiency’s federal employee firings are vulnerable to criticism in Alaska, which has one of the highest concentrations of federal civilian employees in the country — and where accurate weather reports and ocean monitoring are life-or-death matters. So is Republicans’ defunding of public radio, an information lifeline in remote environs.
President Trump’s Iran war has enabled Ms. Peltola to blame him for raising Alaska’s high cost of living. She constantly mentions the price of diesel fuel, which Alaskans use at high rates to fuel small generators and heat homes. And she derides Republicans’ rescinding of Biden-era renewable energy subsidies — not necessarily on behalf of the climate, but because Alaskans want cheaper energy and technologies that enable them to live off-grid.
Ms. Peltola hardly mentions culture wars, which some supporters seem to appreciate. “Different sexual orientations … I don’t care.” said Leila Dengel, 73-year-old nonpartisan voter who said Ms. Peltola won her over at the Valdez event. But, even as she emphasized that she is not “socialistic,” Ms. Dengel said she likes that Ms. Peltola is for average people, and she is furious about the direction of the country, the Iran war and corporations pushing new technologies, such as her insurance company, which she resents for trying to make her go paperless.
The big exception to Ms. Peltola’s de-emphasis on cultural issues is abortion. Championing reproductive choice helps put the “freedom” in her “fish, family, freedom” mantra.
The Peltola agenda might seem like an assortment of positions chosen opportunistically to appeal to Alaskans. “I really wish I had something better to say,” she said after I asked her what a national agenda for center-left pragmatists might look like. She explained that she’s too “Alaska-centric” to think much about partisan politics.
But she has a program, in effect if not in intent.
Ms. Peltola’s pro-oil, pro-fishery stand reflects a concept of environmental stewardship that sees conserving nature as essential to preserving it for human use. Similarly, she emphasizes that building renewables could diversify energy sources in a state addicted to diesel. As Alaska politicians have from time immemorial, she favors spending on basic infrastructure — and gun rights.
In keeping with the times, she indulges in some populist flair, lambasting “millionaires and billionaires” and “corporate greed.” But she isn’t mounting a class revolution. Her objection to wealthy people focuses on their degree of influence in Washington, and she centers on an anti-corruption message backed by proposals to limit political spending and conflicts of interest among members of Congress.
Ms. Peltola campaigns on enhancing Obamacare rather than enacting Medicare for all, which also gives a sense of what she would be like in the Senate. She would be the critical swing vote on tough deals that get Obamacare subsidies and renewables tax credits restored, the debt limit raised or a gratuitous government shutdown ended.
People aren’t out in the streets calling for cooperation and moderation. Then again, activists aren’t the only ones who vote. Particularly in many Mountain West states — which have big natural resource issues, lots of federal land, affection for guns and gas, an outdoorsy culture of self-reliance, relatively little racial polarization and few successful Democratic candidates — a Peltola-like combination of deep-rooted identity and practical outlook has a chance of working.
Even if she loses but overperforms in her state, which has backed Mr. Trump in three elections straight, the result would suggest her strategy worked.
Native Alaskans are politically swingy — Sealaska, a major Native Alaska group, endorsed both Ms. Peltola and Mr. Sullivan — but her background should help her. She might appeal to voters who backed the president but aren’t happy. Mr. Trump in 2024 carried Alaska 54 percent to 41 percent, but his approval ratings in the state now hover in the mid-40s.
And, critically, Alaska Democrats aren’t at war with one another over their direction. They appear to have taken the right lesson from national Democrats’ struggles: Don’t scare the middle. Ms. Peltola has used this space to campaign as a normal person who has normal views. Focusing on persuadable voters with a practical persona built by relentless focus on local issues shouldn’t be a bold strategy. But it makes her a true outsider candidate.
Even as the Republican Party has devolved, the Democrats have lost huge swaths of the country. To get them back, the party needs to leave plenty of room for pragmatists who want to run offbeat campaigns about fish.
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